Joomla SEO – 9 Best Actionable Tips for beginners to Boost Rankings

Google is the favourite search engine of online users. It keeps on updating the algorithm in order to make sure quality websites rank better on the search results. When we talk about SEO, a good number of factors are held responsible for the ranking of the website like page design, website architecture, website loading speed, etc. Things are not different when you have a Joomla website since Joomla SEO is as prime as SEO for other CMSs is. So it becomes necessary to apply right SEO techniques to make it rank on the top of the search results.

Before you get into work with the website just make sure you have chosen the right domain name as well as the web host. You should also make a list of keywords that can help your website to rank better.

1. Complete Joomla Global Configuration

As the first step, visit Joomla Installation Point and look for the htaccess.txt file. Once you find it rename it to .htaccess. After Joomla installation, you need to fill up all the parameters on the Global Configuration Screen. Certain parameters come with default values and if they are good to go with them or else make changes.

Start with the site name and ensure it is short.

Let the page titles have Site name.

Add no value to meta description and keywords to avoid the issues of duplicity.

Now visit the System and Server tabs. Once you are there change the cache setting to On – Conservative Caching.

You can even visit the plugin manager and activate the System – Cache plugin. This is purely optional as sometimes it can lead to some problems.

Now visit Server Settings and turn the Gzip Page Compression to yes.

2. Make Correct Headings

Right article headings are very important for any Joomla SEO friendly website. When we say headings, it includes H1 tag, H2 tags, etc. You have to ensure that depending on the idea of the different web pages, each page should have a corresponding H1 tag which mostly ends up being the title of the post.
You can achieve it in a number of ways:

Make use of extension like Header Tags.

Go for template override.

Set the article heading using the Page Display options in the menu-item.

Type the required H1 in the article editor by setting off the display of the article title in the options.

3. Work On Metadata

When we talk about metadata, there is no need to change the global settings. Metadata needs to be set for every individual Joomla SEO friendly article. To set metadata, you need to cover 3 important things:

Page Title:

If you have worked on the HTML, you must have seen the <title> option there. This is where you enter the page title. You have to make sure that you come up with some sensible title which sets within 65 characters along with Site name preceding it.

Meta Description:

When you search for something on the Google, you come up with a number of results which have two lines of description ending within 160 characters. You can set this description at the article level or by filling up the words in the menu-item or article. Just be sure that you don’t take both steps.

Meta Keywords:

Going for it is completely useless as Google does not notice it at all.

If doing all the stuff manually wrecks your time, you can use TemplateToaster, a Joomla Template Creator which not just saves your hours designing a theme but also provides you with the desirable & SEO optimised results.

4. Optimize Images

Having a Joomla SEO friendly images is very important from the SEO perspective. Moreover, including right file name to the images is very important too. The quality of the image matters too and you can even adjust the size of the image by cropping it.

5. Check the Robots.txt and Sitemap.XML Files

The type and content of your website are understood by Google with the help of these two files. You will get a Robots.txt file from Joomla itself but, it is required to check their values first. The reason for it is that the older websites have the Robots.txt file with values:

Disallow: /images/

Disallow: /media/

Disallow: /templates/

This stops the search engine to go through the particular folder and know your website better. If you have a new website, then you don’t have to worry about this issue.
Another important file for the Joomla SEO friendly website is Sitemap.XML and most of the time it is placed at the root of the website. The file is very important and it is where you will find the URL of the website.

6. Check For Content Duplicity

You may not find evident SEO efforts if your website contains duplicate content. For the same, ensure that the same content is not linked to different menu items and thus creating different URLs. You need to ensure that every link is redirected to a single menu.

Set the .htaccess file and ensure that only one from the www and non-www version of the website can be accessed at a time. Setting some more rules in .htaccess file can help you avoid the issues of duplicity.

7. Look For 404 Errors

You need to mention the URL names on your website. In case you want to change the name of a menu item or an article, you need to ensure that the alias name is retained. In case the URL is changed, make sure then it is redirected to the new URL with the help of 301-redirect. You can easily achieve this with the help of Joomla Core Redirect Manager.

8. Improve Page Loading With Caching

Caching helps to improve the performance of the website. For this, you have to make some changes in the .htaccess file and you are done. If any user is coming to your website for the next time, the web pages will load faster to offer better performance. Improving the performance of the mobile site can also help users have a better experience.

9. Register With Google Webmaster Tools

SEO comprises of a number of steps and so simply sticking to one and following it is not enough. But one thing that you must do is to register your website with Google Webmaster Tools. The process is very simple and Google will itself be a guide to easily get started with it. Moreover, registering your website on the Google Webmaster Tools will help to index your website along with all its pages in the search results.

So follow these important SEO tactics and you will be able to improve the performance of your Joomla website on the search results.

About Christopher Meloni

Christopher Meloni is a Marketing Manager at Kodematix . Apart from his profession, he also has a passion for blogging and he likes to explore new and innovative methods of marketing within his field.